Texas Gothic

“Wow,” said Ben, in bland understatement. “You really aren’t very good at this.”

  “I know the steps.” I wanted to howl with frustration, but that would be even more embarrassing. “I just can’t seem to keep the beat.”

  “Come on. Let’s stay moving.” He suited actions to words, stepping forward with his left foot, prompting me to step back with my right. Quick, quick, slow … This time I managed to keep the rhythm, but our graceless progress around the floor was more like a wrestling match than a dance.

  “Maybe if you would quit trying to lead,” he said, the muscle in his jaw tight. “Stop trying to be in control.”

  I laughed, and not in a good way. “That’s funny. You telling me to relax.”

  He scowled, but just for a second, before it lifted with a grudging twitch of a smile. “Okay. That’s a fair point.”

  “Maybe this”—I made a sawing motion with our joined hands, which was a pretty good imitation of our dancing—“isn’t all my fault. It takes two to tango, as they say.”

  “I am a good dancer,” he said, with a bit of an edge. “If you would just let me steer.”

  “Maybe I should steer,” I said, breathless because at some point he’d adjusted his hold on my waist, fingers spread from my ribs to the curve of my hip. He had to feel my heart beating double-time, but maybe he would think it was the exertion of the dance.

  “You can’t steer,” he said equably, as well he might, since he was in control and I wasn’t. “You’re going backwards.”

  “Why do I have to go backwards? Because I’m the girl and you’re the guy?”

  “Because I can see over your head.”

  My laugh was more of a snort, but it was a concession all the same. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

  A smile acknowledged that briefly before turning wry. “Except for the fiendish plot of the Mad Monk of McCulloch Ranch.”

  He’d gone for melodrama, but there was a grim thread beneath the drollery. Meeting Ben’s family had explained a lot. Like how every time he said “my” land, it wasn’t a greedy or egotistical word. It was a lonely one. He must feel the entire weight of the ranch on his shoulders. It wasn’t fair—I wasn’t sure it was true—but that never stopped anyone from feeling they had the sole responsibility of keeping things running smoothly. I should know.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I promised. He blinked in surprise, and a tide of flustered embarrassment made me add, “Phin and me, and all the guys from the university. Maybe Daisy. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  His gaze shuttered. “You just want to find your ghost.”

  “No,” I started; then I had to revise, “Okay, yes. But that’s ancillary to getting to the bottom of things.”

  “Is it all just a mystery novel plot to you, Amy? Or some kind of experiment?”

  I didn’t temper my bitter laugh. “Trust me. I’m invested in the discovery of the truth. It’s not just academic to me, Ben.”

  “Personally invested?”

  I hesitated, because I was talking about ridding myself of the ghost, and he was asking something else. This accord was new and uncertain. Not to mention intermittent. But someone had to go first. “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe I’m glad to hear that.” He smiled, very slightly, and I realized that we’d stopped crashing into things. His grip had lightened until his fingers tickled my ribs, and my hand rested, feather light, in his. Which somehow felt like a stronger connection than the death grip we’d had earlier.

  “Your cousin,” he began, and I braced myself, “she can really do what she says?”

  God, I hated point-blank questions. I hated that he asked one now, in this moment, when I didn’t want to lie to him, even by twisting my words.

  “She can do what she says. I could show you Phin’s pictures of psychic energy, or I could show you how Aunt Hyacinth’s cream healed my scratches. But you won’t believe me unless … well, unless you believe.”

  Our steps had slowed, until we stood at the edge of the floor, not really dancing at all. He opened our linked hands, keeping the fingers joined, but showing my palm, which had been raw and red from climbing the rope the night before, but was now, at most, pink. Then he turned me under our arms, twirling me like a ballerina, but slowly. The back of my sundress wasn’t low, but it showed that the scratches from my fall were far more healed than twenty-four hours could account for.

  “Unbelievable.”

  I sighed and completed the slow spin. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

  “You take this completely in stride. How do you do that?”

  “I’ve lived with it my whole life.” I shrugged.

  Wariness—the first hint of it—crept into his expression. “So what do you do?”

  I stepped back, knowing the moment was over. “I hold it all together.”

  31

  ben and I started bickering again as soon as he told me he was going on the stakeout with us.

  “You don’t have to do this.” I was still arguing in his truck as he pulled up to the gate at Goodnight Farm, where we were picking up Daisy. “Mark will be there. It’s not like Phin, Daisy, and I will be sitting out in the middle of the field waiting for the boogeyman to come and get us.”

  He turned to face me, bracing a hand on the back of the seat. “I’m not worried about the boogeyman, I’m worried about your damned diesel truck. I’ll deal with whatever weird thing anyone says or does. I won’t comment or call them crazy or anything. So you just deal with the fact that I’m going to be there.”

  I clamped my jaw on another useless protest. Daisy was waiting inside, ready to go, having exchanged the miniskirt for a pair of camo cargo pants. I ran upstairs and put on my last clean pair of jeans, herded the reluctant dogs out of the house, threw some feed down for the goats and the donkey, then dashed to the truck, where Daisy was sitting in the middle of the bench seat, telling Ben God knows what while they waited on me.

  Mark and Phin were already at the dig when we pulled up. They climbed out of the Jeep as Ben parked the truck farther up on the hill overlooking the V-shaped slope of the excavation field. Phin wrestled with the heavy satchel on her shoulder until Mark took it from her. And she let him.

  “Well, I’ll be dipped,” murmured Daisy, leaning against the truck fender to wait for them. “Is the mad scientist human after all?”

  I raised a warning finger. “Do not tease her, Daisy Temperance Goodnight, or I will make you sorry.”

  Mark set the satchel on the tailgate of Ben’s truck. Phin had changed clothes, too, and if she’d done so in the car, that could account for her ponytail coming loose. Maybe even the color in her cheeks, visible in the light of the battery-powered lantern Ben had set in the bed of the pickup.

  I slanted a look of narrow-eyed speculation at Mark, but his attention was on Daisy. “How about you?” he asked. “Do you need any equipment or anything?”

  “I leave that to Phin,” she said, and Phin shot her a death glare, then started handing out gadgets.

  She handed me the EMF meter and plopped the infrared thermometer into Ben’s hands. It looked a little like a sci-fi laser pistol and he asked, “What do I do with this? Shoot aliens?”

  “Just be ready to take temperature readings if there’s a paranormal event,” she said.

  “Um. Sure. And I’ll know when that happens?” Phin gave me a look, like I’d purposely inflicted him on her. I took over, explaining how to work the thermometer. It wasn’t brain surgery, and he nodded to show he understood. “So, what do we do now?”

  “We go watch Daisy’s dog and pony show.”

  While we’d been talking, Mark and Daisy had gone down the hill. I could see him gesturing to the various holes and explaining the stakes in the ground as Phin went to join them.

  I risked a glance at Ben. “How are you holding up?”

  He looked lost and a little grumpy. “I feel like I’ve gone into the Twilight Zone.”

  “It helps if you don
’t think about it too hard.” Catching his hand, I tugged him away from the truck. “Let’s go.”

  Daisy stood at the farthest point of the partitioned field. She shook out her arms, shrugged her shoulders, closed her eyes with her hands down by her sides, looking a lot like a gymnast preparing for a routine.

  She frowned and flexed her hands, as if reaching toward the ground. “I get very old death—violent death—but it’s …” She shook her head like she was considering and rejecting descriptions. “Old. Finished.”

  “Is it because the bones have been removed?” asked Mark. Ben, Phin, and I stood beside him, out of Daisy’s way.

  She shook her head again. “No. I’ve read empty burial sites before.”

  Ben glanced at me with a question, and I answered quietly so I wouldn’t distract her. “Daisy sometimes consults for the police. They keep it on the down low. ‘Police turn to sixteen-year-old psychic’ isn’t a headline city hall wants to see.”

  Daisy ignored us. Hands extended to the ground, she walked up the hill, stepping carefully over the stakes and twine. “Okay, there’s still something here.” She pointed, and Mark made a note of the spot. I hadn’t noticed until then that he was carrying his clipboard and grid diagram. He penciled in two more places she indicated as she went.

  When she came to the pit the grave robbers had made, she bent and gathered a handful of dirt. “Wow. They managed to tear through this site. I’m just getting greed and self-interest, not malevolence.”

  “Anything older?” Phin asked. “That’s where we found the rosary and the satchel with the gold ore in it. It might help to know what the grave robbers were looking for.”

  “Let me see.” She dropped to her knees and dug both her hands into the ground. “Earth doesn’t conduct very well. It’s more of an insula— Whoa.”

  “What?” I took a step closer, hopeful for some clue. I noticed Ben did, too.

  Daisy pulled her fist from the dirt and opened it up. Her hand shook slightly in the beam of the flashlight, and lying in her palm was a small chunk of metal.

  “Is that a musket ball?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah,” said Daisy, in a strained voice. “Somebody take it, please.”

  Mark jumped forward and plucked the bullet from her hand. The whoosh of her relieved breath stirred the cloud of dust around her. “That’s definitely what killed that guy,” she said.

  “But we found an arrowhead by the A site,” said Mark. “We’d been thinking perhaps a party from Mexico was ambushed by Apache or Comanche.”

  “Native Americans had firearms, too,” said Ben. “They were pretty quick to step up the arms race. I mean, wouldn’t you?”

  Daisy sat back on her heels. “Here’s all I can tell you. Definitely violent death, I’m thinking you’re right about the ambush. There’s a surprised quality to it. That guy”—she pointed to the musket ball in Mark’s hand—“was thinking about gold, but not for himself. Spain, the Church maybe. God was on his mind, but … well, God usually is just then. Or so I’ve seen.”

  Tentatively, I held out my hand for the rusted metal ball, and Mark dropped it into my palm. Nothing weird happened, and I let out my breath. The bullet wasn’t really round anymore, but misshapen and pitted.

  “I saw the apparition around about there,” I said, pointing to a spot not far from her. “And the local ghost rumor concerns a monk and a treasure. It seemed too much of a coincidence to find a rosary and a bag with gold ore in it. Even if the Mad Monk is a smoke screen, is it possible the actual apparition has a similar story?”

  She shrugged apologetically. “I don’t know what to tell you, Am. This whole site is … well, it’s dead. What’s here is old and done, like a closed book.”

  Mark ventured an interpretation. “So, even though these men died violently, they’ve moved on.”

  “Right. So your monk, Amy, either has something unfinished, or maybe fears what happens next. Maybe he died in a state of mortal sin, as my principal, Sister Mikaela, would say, and doesn’t want to face judgment.” She climbed to her feet and dusted off her hands, the spikes on her bracelet and collar gleaming in the glow of Ben’s flashlight.

  “But he didn’t die here.”

  Disappointment sank heavily onto my heart and I realized I’d pinned a lot of hope on Daisy. I don’t know what I’d expected her to find, but it was more than this.

  “So, that’s it?” said Phin, voicing my feelings. “You drove two hours for a little hand waving?”

  Daisy glared at her. “I didn’t say I was finished.”

  “What about a séance?” Phin asked.

  “Are you kidding me?” Daisy had to say it, because I was speechless.

  “Whatever it takes to figure out Amy’s ghost problem. No matter how unscientific.” My heart warmed at her sacrifice. Even when she added, “Besides. I want to see what the Kirlianometer shows when you do your thing.”

  Daisy rolled her eyes, and Ben, who’d been quiet all this time, said, “Okay, you guys. I’ve gone with the flow so far. But I have to ask. What’s a Kirlianometer?”

  I laughed at the surreality of Phin explaining paraphysics, or whatever she was calling it now, to Ben McCulloch. Maybe I was a little hysterical. I was definitely sort of sleep deprived.

  So when that sudden, deep whump grabbed at my insides, for a moment I thought I’d imagined it. But the others all jumped, too. Ben looked at me, startled, and asked, “Is that the sound that—”

  He didn’t finish the question. Over the hills came a low groan, an unearthly moan that rose to a squeal of protest, sharp enough to arrow to heaven, soft enough to float there. The hills carried the sound and transformed it to an eerie chorus of sighs and whispers, until they trailed into silence.

  Mark grabbed Ben’s arm as he turned his head, trying to echolocate. “Which way … ?”

  “That direction,” said Ben. He pointed toward the granite outcropping that had loomed over me the night before. “Let’s take the truck.”

  And with exactly that much discussion, they ran for transportation—Ben, the same person who’d yelled at me for running through the pasture chasing mysterious noises. But I understood completely that desperation of trying to find something concrete to hold on to in a sea of frustration and mystery.

  “Guys!” I yelled, and sprinted after them. Like hell they were leaving me behind.

  I was so caught up in the moment, I didn’t notice the cold until I was already through it. I dismissed the gleam that wasn’t moonlight. But I couldn’t ignore the command that barked across the night.

  “¡Alto! ¡Cuidado! No vayan ustedes.”

  The only thing more shocking than the order was the voice. I spun to stare at Daisy, who stood like a marble statue bathed in moonlight, suffused by the unearthly glow and a chill that reached between us into my bones. Her eyes were hollow and unseeing as she lifted a heavy hand toward me.

  “Escuchame, niña. Escuchame o tu puedes morir.”

  Listen to me, little girl. Listen to me or you will die.

  32

  ben’s curse broke the silence in the wake of Daisy’s voice. “What is wrong with you? What are you playing at?”

  Mark spoke low, a warning. “Dude. It’s not a game. Look at her.”

  She wasn’t completely still after all. She shivered, her lips blue with the cold, as her breath fogged in the air around her. It was strange seeing it from the outside, but what was happening to Daisy seemed different from what happened to me when the specter appeared.

  The ghost wasn’t struggling against the barrier between the plane of the living and the world of the spirit. It had found a door in Daisy.

  Phin recovered first. “Ask it what it wants,” she told me.

  I made a wordless sound of protest—was this the time for Twenty Questions?—but swallowed it. How would I know if I didn’t ask?

  “¿Que quiere usted?” I asked, forcing my cold lips to move and my brain to find the words. Daisy’s voice said, “Búscame.”

/>   “Look for you where?” My breath fogged the summer night air, and when I looked at my hands, they were like Daisy, mottled with cold. “¿Dónde?”

  “Puedes encontrarme. Búscame.”

  My brain stumbled over that one. Mark, moving closer to me, supplied the translation. “You can find me. Look for me.”

  “Where?” I repeated.

  “La mina. Búscame. La mina.”

  “The San Sabá mine?” Mark ventured, making the same leap I did, but voicing it before I could.

  “Puedes encontrarme, niña. Búscame. Búscame.… ”

  “Amy,” said Ben. I could feel his growing horror even through the ice that seemed to encase me. “Do something.”

  “I don’t know what!” I said through chattering teeth.

  “You do,” said Phin. “You’ve got this. Don’t let it be the boss.”

  I was so cold, moving felt like cracking ice in my joints. But I pushed forward and threw up a hand, just like the ghost addressed me. “¡Alto!” I said. Stop. “Leave her alone.”

  “Déjala,” whispered Mark.

  “¡Déjala!” I shouted, putting everything into the command. All my air, all my strength, all my love for my family and for Daisy and her squabbles with Phin. I reached down through the layer of ice and found something Goodnight in me after all.

  The glow snuffed out, and I felt the sting of warmth returning to my fingers. Daisy’s arm dropped and she staggered. Ben, of all of us, was the quickest to react, and he jumped forward to catch her. His flashlight dropped to the ground and rolled down the hill.

  “Whoa,” said Daisy, in her normal voice, as she hung limp from Ben’s steadying grip. “That must have been a doozy.”

  And then she turned away, just in time to avoid throwing up on his shoes.

  Mark and Phin took Daisy back to the house after that. She still looked green, and moaned about her head exploding. I personally thought Phin needed to shut up for a while about parapsychology being useless.

  Ben and I stayed to watch the dig site, though I suspected both of us considered it a token gesture at that point. We sat on the tailgate, the night so quiet, I could hear the tiny squeals of bats hunting for their dinner, and I shivered.